Part One – The Mouse in Scrubs
A seven-foot titan, close to three hundred pounds and streaked with someone else’s blood, crashed through the sliding doors of Mercy General Hospital in Chicago, Illinois. In an instant, a rainy Tuesday night in the emergency room turned into a disaster waiting to happen. He hurled three security guards aside as if they weighed nothing, sending doctors scrambling, patients screaming, and staff diving for cover.
The police were still ten minutes out—an eternity when the threat is already in the room. In the middle of the chaos, an unlikely figure stepped forward. Aurora.
On paper, she was just the mousy rookie nurse who had been scolded for trembling hands an hour earlier. The kind of new hire people whispered about as a mistake. But she didn’t run.
She walked straight toward the giant, met his wild eyes, and did something no one in that ER expected. In the stunned silence that followed, everyone learned that the mouse was actually a lion in scrubs. The clock on the wall in Mercy General’s emergency department clicked over to 10:00 p.m.
It was late November in Chicago, and the cold had that particular Midwestern bite that seeped into bones and chewed at joints. Rain hammered the ambulance bay doors so hard they rattled in their frames. Inside, the fluorescent lights buzzed with a faint, headache-inducing flicker that only night-shift workers truly understood.
“Aurora. For God’s sake, move faster.”
The sharp voice of Head Nurse Brenda Miller sliced through the low murmur of the ER. Brenda was in her fifties, cynical, and moved with the ruthless efficiency of someone who had seen everything and liked almost none of it.
She stood with her hands on her hips, glaring at the newest addition to the nursing staff. Aurora Jenkins flinched. She was twenty-eight but looked younger.
Slight, barely five-foot-four, with messy brown hair pulled back into a loose clip that always seemed one tug away from falling apart. Her scrubs were a size too big, swallowing her frame and making her look smaller than she was. She kept her head down, eyes fixed on the IV tray she was organizing.
“I’m sorry, Brenda,” Aurora murmured, her voice barely above a whisper. “I just wanted to make sure the saline ratios were—”
“I don’t pay you to double-check ratios the pharmacy already checked,” Brenda snapped, snatching a chart from the counter. “We pay you to get needles in arms and clear beds.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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